Scythian Culture - Preservation of The Frozen Tombs of The Altai Mountains (UNESCO)

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PRESERVATION OF THE FROZEN TOMBS OF THE ALTAI MOUNTAINS Fig. 10 Wooden horse pendant from the Berel’ 11 kurgan in the shape of an Achaemenian horned lion transformed in steppe style. © Mission Archéologique Française en Asie Centrale (CNRS-MAE) H.-P. Francfort. and the eye depicted in profile in Near Eastern manner suggests instead that this is an image of a lion. Here, the adaptation of an Achaemenid motif into steppe art can again be seen, this time in the form of the body art practiced by the Altai peoples. In the Berel’-11 kurgan, the image of a Persian lion with head and eye in profile and a curling hairy mane, known from Iran and Pazyryk, has been transformed into a composition in which a bird of prey grasps the head of a wild sheep in its beak. Nevertheless, the composition retains the canonical proportions of the Achaemenid original, as well as a row of beads and curling mane. A transformed form of the Achaemenid sphinx was also found in Berel’-11 (Fig.11). Achaemenid-looking artifacts, whether imported or by inspiration, only appear in elite burials (except for one piece from kurgan 22 of Justyd XII), and are seen on the dresses, artifacts and furniture, as well as on the trappings of the horses discovered in the burial pits near the funerary chambers. Most Achaemenid art in the Altai came from a process of selection of themes, motifs or stylistic elements by the ruling class and artists. The source of this process lay in the use of the objects (not monumental and courtly art, but horse trappings for a nomadic way of life), in the materials and techniques at hand (metal, wood, gold and tin worked by cutting, casting, hammering, etc.), and in the meaning of the images (ornamental of mythological). The Achaemenid elements are very often reworked or reshaped according to the stylistic requirements of the local nomadic taste of the steppe, following old artistic traditions. However, the importance of Achaemenid art far into the steppes and late into the 3 rd century until 250 bce should not be underestimated. It appears at the end of the 4 th century, having been almost completely absent from Central Asia before this date, as can be seen from artifacts found in Arzhan- 2 (c. 600 bce), Tuekta-1 (c. 440) and Chilikty. Simi-larly, the main period of exchange with the Chinese cultural area came after the 5 th century. The role of the Altai as a cultural hub in spite of its apparent isolation was determined by the prosperity of its pastoral population and possibly also by that population’s control of mineral resources like gold and tin. The mobility and speed of its nomadic population during the ancient Iron Age, and its contacts with the expanding agrarian empires, created very original circumstances. But without the knowledge acquired from studying the modest non-elite burials, and from the preserved finds made in the aristocratic frozen burials, nothing of this history would have come down to us. This is why the conservation and study of this unique expression of the world’s cultural heritage is such a vital task for the international community of scholars and for UNESCO and why it is a vital task, above all, for the governments and populations of the region, particularly now that this heritage is endangered by global warming and the thawing of the permafrost. 40
CHAPTER I • SCYTHIANS IN THE EURASIAN STEPPE AND THE PLACE OF THE ALTAI MOUNTAINS IN IT The Silk Roads and the Road of the Steppes: Eurasia and the Scythian World Pierre Cambon Conservateur en chef Musée Guimet, France Following the major foreign archaeological expeditions – Russian, British, German, French and Japanese – that took place in Chinese Tukestan (today’s Xinjiang) between 1900 and 1914 against a background of imperial rivalries, the idea of the Silk Roads as one of the major routes of exchange between the western world, whether Indian or Iranian, Roman or Mediterranean, and the Far East or North East Asia, to which China appeared to be the gateway, appeared. This idea culminated in the Silk Roads programme launched by UNESCO in the 1990s and in the “Sérinde” exhibition held at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1995. Avoiding the Taklamakan depression, two main routes joined Kashgar in the West with Dunhuang in the borderlands of China in the East. The older of these routes and the furthest south passed through Khotan and ran south through the foothills of the Himalayas, while the younger went through Aksou, the Quca oasis and the Turfan oasis before reaching China. This was above all a caravan route of the type evoked by Ibn Battuta in his travels, and is was also the route followed by Chinese pilgrims traveling to India in search of religious texts. It was this latter route that led to the expansion of Buddhism, which spread alongside the merchants and the first translators coming from Central Asia, Swat, or Afghanistan and that pivotal region that Aurel Stein called “Serindia” to produce a unique Buddhist form of art in the oases, whose style, codes and iconography influenced traditional Chinese Asia. This region was conquered during the Han period by Chinese armies, lost during the period of the Six Dynasties and re-conquered under the Tang. It gave rise in the years that followed to the growth of ephemeral empires such as that of the Western Turks before the period of the Mongol invasions that overwhelmed China and the Iranian world during the 12 th century ce under Genghis Khan and his successors, which realized beyond his wildest dreams Alexander the Great’s ambition of uniting East and West within a single empire. Yet, if the “Silk Roads” in the sense in which this term is often understood today means Chinese Tukestan or contemporary Xinjiang, in other words, a frontier zone on the edge of empires, it nevertheless also denotes a sedentary world that has its own history. The world of the oases and the caravans is not that of the steppes and the nomads, the latter being left out of written history. For many centuries, only indirect echoes of this latter world reached us in the accounts left by ancient Greek authors or in Chinese annals, as well as in the later works of Arab travelers. This world of movement recedes before us and is often compared to the sea or to an ocean whose boundaries are fluid and changing. Alexander the Great stopped at the boundaries of the sedentary world in Afghanistan and did not seek to push beyond the Oxus, following the Achaemenid example in this respect. However, Fig. 1 Pendants known as “The King and the Dragons”, Afghanistan, Tillia tepe, Tomb II, 1 st cent. Gold, turquoise, garnet and lapislazuli, 12.5 x 6.5 cm, MK 04.40.109. National Museum of Afghanistan © Thierry Ollivier / Musée Guimet.
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Scythian Culture - Preservation of The Frozen Tombs of The Altai Mountains (UNESCO)

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